Aye, Eye: Pirates Prevailing on Pitch Selection

The Pirates are off to a surprisingly hot 13–7 start, tied for the fifth-best record in the majors, and they have a burgeoning offense to thank. At the close of play on Thursday, after scoring 37 runs over a four-game stretch, they rank second in the National League with 103 runs scored, are tied for fourth in the majors with 27 home runs, and are third with a .446 team slugging percentage and eighth with a .339 wOBA. They’ve managed to limit strikeouts — they’re seventh among major league teams with a 20.6% strikeout rate – and have improved their walk rate by two percentage points since last year. Pirates pitching has handled their side of business well enough — their 12th-ranked 4.03 ERA represents a significant improvement from 2022 but looks a little cleaner than their 17th-ranked ​​4.30 FIP and 22nd-ranked 4.55 xFIP — but the real bright light has been that offense.

We’re already getting to the appropriate time in this piece to repeat FanGraphs’ April refrain: it’s early. But when looking for answers this early in the season, I like to follow a general rule of thumb: the more granular the data, the better. As Russell Carleton wrote in this 2011 piece, “The way to increase reliability of a measure is to have more observations in the data set.” This early in the season, we can often learn more reliably from statistics that are based on every pitch a hitter sees or every swing he takes — something like swing rate or contact rate — than metrics with at-bats or plate appearances in the denominator. This makes plate discipline and pitch selection a good area to explore looking for answers in April.

In the case of the Pirates, improved pitch selection has been a great triumph so far this year — and it’s not that they’re necessarily being more patient, but more that they’re making better decisions. The team is swinging at 45.5% of offerings this year, down just a tenth of a point from last year, but far more of those swings are targeting pitches in the zone. Pittsburgh ranks second in the majors with a 27.9% chase percentage, an improvement from 31.7% last year. After finishing dead last in 2022 in zone swing percentage at 65.3%, the Pirates are all the way up to sixth this season with a 69.3% rate. The improvements have been nearly universal, but even as their depth has been tested with injuries to Oneil Cruz and Ji-Man Choi, a few picky Pirates are leading the way.

Centerfielder Jack Suwinski has been among the most pleasant surprises in Pittsburgh, with a beautifully unsustainable .480 xwOBA to show for it, the third-highest in the majors. He owes a lot of his success to his ability to hit the ball hard; his 95.5 mph average exit velocity is in the 97th percentile, his 57.1% hard-hit rate is in the 95th, and his 28.6% barrel rate is in the 100th. And he owes some of that success to his pitch selection. A characteristically patient hitter, Suwinski has been much more selective so far in 2023, registering a 14.0% chase percentage compared to last year’s 24.5% mark — the difference between the 75th percentile and the 99th. Just look at this map of every pitch he’s seen:

He’s done a particularly good job laying off of pitches placed out of the strike zone off the outer half of the plate, where pitchers have targeted him frequently. Suwinski swung at 20.8% of outside pitches in the shadow and chase zones in 2022, resulting in a .263 wOBA on those pitches. This year, that rate is down to 12.8% — just six swings in 47 opportunities, and an xwOBA of .549.

Letting those go has meant not only an increase in Suwinski’s walk rate and a decrease in his strikeout rate, but also that the pitches that he is putting into play are better pitches to hit, leading to better contact. Twenty-five of his 28 batted balls would have been no-doubter strikes, with the only three exceptions being a just-high-and-out Michael Kopech fastball he drove at 103.7 mph for a go-ahead sac fly, and a pair of groundouts.

That’s a lot of the middle of the zone. The 24 batted balls, meanwhile, have resulted in 10 hits, five homers, and a .537 wOBA, compared to a .399 mark on batted balls last year.

Next to Suwinski near the top of the chase-rate leaderboards is newcomer Connor Joe, who has dropped his chase percentage from an already-strong 21.7% last year to 13.7% so far in 2023 — from the 87th percentile to the 99th. It wasn’t immediately clear how much the 30-year-old ex-Rockie would factor into the Pirates’ crowded outfield picture after a down year in 2022. But an injury to Choi and Joe’s play have earned him a spot in the lineup nearly every day, where he’s slashing .340/.421/.640 and garnering praise from the Pirates’ front office.

For Joe, too, his batted ball abilities and pitch selection have put him in good position to stick in Pittsburgh’s lineup. He has laid off bad pitches with the best of them, rebuffing offspeed and breaking pitches particularly efficiently; he’s swung at just eight of 54 balls out of the zone so far. And while there’s a fair bit of swing-and-miss in Suwinski’s approach, Joe hits most of what he swings at. This season, he is making contact on 80.9% of his swings, right in line with his career-high mark last year, helping him stay above-average in both walk rate and strikeout rate.

And not only is Joe making good contact, but most of it is also coming in the zone. In a great piece this week about Vladimir Guerrero Jr., my colleague Ben Clemens noted that making more contact isn’t an inherently good thing if the contact is on junky, out-of-the-zone pitching. Joe has done it the right way: by ticking his in-zone contact rate up from 89.9% to 90.8%, while his out-of-zone contact rate has dropped from 65.4% to 54.2%.

Here are Joe’s batted balls so far:

Again, that’s a lot of contact on pitches located in nice-to-hit spots (and we’ll forgive him for swinging at that yellow dot all the way to the left, a 100-mph Jordan Hicks sinker that ended up being the farthest-inside pitch hit for a triple since 2018):

Then there’s switch-hitting infielder Rodolfo Castro, who’s also seeing increased playing time due to injury after Cruz fractured his ankle in a home plate collision earlier this month. The 23-year-old has always struggled with his plate discipline: over the last two seasons, he had struck out 27.2% of the time and walked just 7.5%, swinging at 32.8% of pitches outside the zone. Through this point in 2023, he’s down to a 22.4% strikeout rate and up to a 8.6% walk rate, with a 26.4% O-Swing% in part to thank. Overall, he’s offered at just 44.6% of pitches, down from 49.1% in his previous MLB experience. He’s still showing some tendency to chase down-and-in breaking balls from both sides of the plate, but he’s doing better to lay off the offspeed pitches below the zone, which last year had been a bane. Castro swung at 30.2% of changeups below the bottom boundary of the strike zone in 2022, missing altogether on 15 of 19 swings and putting the ball in play just once for a weak groundout. This year, he’s swung at just two of 12 (16.7%), laying off tough pitches, like this close two-strike changeup from John Schreiber:

The more we get into specific pitches in specific zones, the more we get into shaky sample size territory; we’re now taking observations away from our data set, and Castro could bite at a few low changeups tomorrow and make that point moot. But having seen over 100 pitches outside of the zone, he’s now in the 92nd percentile overall in Statcast chase percentage with a 20.6% rate.

While Suwinski, Joe, and Castro are perhaps the most dramatic examples of this top-of-the-league pitch selection, they aren’t alone in improving the Pirates’ lineup. Bryan Reynolds, in his pursuit to do everything well, has decreased his chase rate from 31.5% in 2022 to 25.2% this year and increased his zone swing rate from 73.0% to 77.4%. Carlos Santana and Andrew McCutchen aren’t new to patient hitting but are to the lineup (sort of, in the case of McCutchen). Ke’Bryan Hayes, while not a model of patience, is doing much better to get his bat on the ball and avoid strikeouts, going from the 44th percentile in strikeout rate and 75th in whiff rate in 2022 to the 97th in each category so far. Ji Hwan Bae is the lone Pirate qualifier under the 50th percentile in Statcast chase percentage in 2023:

Winning 13 games in any 20-game stretch is not all that much to write home about, even if the Pirates haven’t done that since 2019, and it’s too early to say much about what this hot start means. But the more granularly we’re able to look at the numbers, the closer we get to meaningful patterns, and a pitch-by-pitch, swing-by-swing look at the Pittsburgh offense reveals some hopeful contributions from a handful of players that could end up breaking the franchise’s stretch of seven straight sub-.500 seasons.

Hitting coaches are too often semi-anonymous until someone needs to be blamed for a team-wide slump, something that Pirates hitting coach Andy Haines knows all too well after being dumped by the Brewers following a cold four-game NLDS against the Braves in 2021. But this is the kind of success throughout most of a lineup that leads you to tip your cap to the club’s hitting program; cheers to Haines and assistant hitting coach Christian Marrero, who are seeing patience pay off through these first few weeks of 2023.